Enhanced environments are often used to provide a media-rich experience for participants in meetings, lectures, “virtual tours”, and other ongoing events. For example, a special room that is equipped with enhanced audio and/or visual capabilities is used for meetings. These rooms may include microphone and speaker systems, as well as visual capture and presentation systems and computer resources such as Internet connectivity. Using these rooms enhances the ability of meeting participants to present and participate in a discussion.
However, these enhanced environments are limited in that they utilize an expensive, static infrastructure. Because of the time and effort required to install them, the visual and audio systems are typically installed in a substantially permanent manner. As a result, meetings and other ongoing events that use these enhanced media capabilities are limited to being conducted at one of these specially equipped rooms. This can be especially inconvenient in the case of a multi-site conference or other event if some of the participants do not have access to one of these specially equipped rooms. Alternatively, audio/visual equipment can be brought into a room to provide enhanced media capture and presentation capabilities for a meeting or other ongoing event. However, procuring and setting up these enhanced media capture and presentation systems can be inconvenient for many users and are not practical for impromptu meetings and spontaneous events. Some prior methods have attempted to bundle the equipment needed for enhanced media capture and presentation into a single portable device. Because such devices concentrate all capture sensors into a single location, they often fail to adequately cover the diverse happenings within an ongoing events. Further, they are less able to provide personalized audio output, visual display, or audio/visual capture for each of the individual event participants.
The enhanced media capabilities of these special rooms are sometimes used to capture a record of an ongoing event. Additional services for event participants may include summarizing and indexing the occurrences within an event for later reference or for the benefit of others who did not attend the event. These services are only available for events held in these specialized locations. There are also portable devices that can be brought into a room and used for capturing the occurrences within an ongoing event. However, these devices can also be inconvenient for many users to procure and set up for the event and are not practical for impromptu or spontaneous events. By concentrating all capture sensors into a single device, these devices have limited coverage of the event happenings, and are often limited in their ability to provide records of the event that are personalized to each participant or viewer. Thus, current methods for providing enhanced environments for facilitating ongoing events such as meetings and lectures, and/or for capturing, summarizing, and indexing the happenings within these events, are inadequate.